A Chemist Among Writers
Few scientific discoveries of the 20th century have remained as tethered to literature as LSD. Albert Hofmann, the Sandoz chemist who synthesized the molecule in 1938 and discovered its effects in 1943, did not seek out his peers among pharmacologists, but among writers. In his talk, “LSD: Completely Personal,” delivered at the 1996 Worlds of Consciousness Conference in Heidelberg, he dedicated much of his time to remembering two of them: Aldous Huxley and Ernst Jünger. What follows is a reorganization of that testimony.
Stockholm, 1963: The Last Image of Huxley
In late summer 1963, Hofmann accompanied Huxley to Stockholm for the annual meeting of the World Academy of Art and Science. The congress focused on “World Resources,” but Huxley shifted the focus toward what he called “Human Resources”—the innate and untapped capacities of the human being. He argued that Western man, burdened by a hypertrophied rationality, needed to relearn how to perceive reality directly, unfiltered by words and concepts. In psychedelic substances, he saw, above all, a training ground for that task.
He was supported by psychiatrist Humphry Osmond, who years earlier had coined the term “psychedelic”—literally, “mind-manifesting”—and who provided a report on its possibilities. According to Hofmann, that symposium was his last meeting with Huxley; his appearance already betrayed his illness, though his intellectual aura remained intact.
“LSD—do it”: A Literary Death
Aldous Huxley died on November 22, 1963, the same day as the Kennedy assassination, an event that eclipsed the news. His wife, Laura Huxley, sent Hofmann a copy of the letter she wrote to Julian Huxley recounting that final day. Doctors had prepared her for a dramatic end—the spasms and asphyxia common in the terminal phase of esophageal cancer—but Huxley died in peace. In the morning, no longer able to speak, he wrote a request on a piece of paper: that he be administered LSD intramuscularly. Laura honored his wish.
Huxley was thus putting into practice what he had imagined in his novel Island: the use of “moksha medicine” to accompany one’s passing. Hofmann also recalled the price that activism cost him during his life: his public defense of psychedelics diminished his professional credibility and even the affection of some readers and friends. It is advisable to read this episode with some distance. The scene, while moving, has been repeated so often that it has become a trope; and the idea of a substance as a tool to “die well” belongs more to the realm of Huxley’s personal convictions than to any clinical evidence.
Jünger: From the Horror of War to the Magic of the Everyday
His relationship with Ernst Jünger began much earlier and from an unlikely origin. As a teenager, Hofmann had read Jünger’s war diary, which was required reading at his school. But it was his second book, Das Abenteuerliche Herz (The Adventurous Heart), that surprised him: that the same author capable of coldly describing the horrors of modern warfare could later open the reader’s eyes to the wonder of simple things struck him as an enigma. In that prose, he recognized something of the state of mind of his own childhood mystical experiences.
Their personal contact began with a humble gesture: a thank-you note in June 1947 for one of the care packages sent to post-war Germany. From there, a correspondence emerged that would last for decades. At first, they did not speak of drugs.
Why the Laboratory Didn’t Work
LSD entered the scene due to Hofmann’s dissatisfaction. After his 1943 self-experiment, Sandoz began clinical trials with volunteers, and he participated himself. The experience was revealing in the opposite sense: in that sterile environment—white coats, machines that seemed like little monsters from a Hieronymus Bosch painting, psychological tests experienced as torture—he felt the essence of the experience was lost. He understood, firsthand, the weight of the environment and the state of mind, what the Anglo-Saxon psychedelic culture would years later summarize as set and setting.
By contrast, he wanted to explore LSD in a warm environment, with music and good company. He immediately thought of Jünger, who had already experimented with mescaline and accepted the proposal without hesitation.
Bottmingen, February 1951: The “House Cat” Session
The joint experiment took place in early February 1951, in the living room of Hofmann’s home in Bottmingen, near Basel. Out of caution, he invited a pharmacologist friend, Professor Heribert Konzett, to provide medical assistance. Faced with a man as sensitive as Jünger, Hofmann opted for a deliberately low dose.
The session did not reach a profound depth, but it was intensely aesthetic. The roses in the room seemed to glow; a Mozart flute and harp concerto sounded “like music of the gods”; the smoke from a stick of Japanese incense flowed with the same plasticity as their thoughts. With their eyes closed, each traveled on their own: Jünger through oriental landscapes, Hofmann among caravans and North African oases, and Konzett toward a Buddhist sense of timelessness.
The parallel between the three experiences was striking. Even so, none crossed the threshold of the overtly mystical: the door remained ajar. Jünger, accustomed to high doses of mescaline, declared that, compared to that “tiger,” the LSD had seemed like a mere “house cat.” He would change his mind in later trials. That vision of the incense would reappear, transfigured, in his story Besuch auf Godenholm (Visit to Godenholm).
A Drug as Destiny: The Disturbing Idea
Their friendship deepened around this subject. In their correspondence, Hofmann and Jünger returned again and again to substances and their implications. In a letter from December 1961, Hofmann formulated an intuition that remains dizzying: if a tiny trace of a substance—similar in structure to the brain’s natural compounds—is enough to alter consciousness, character, and one’s worldview, what remains of free will when the presence or absence of that compound escapes our control? He closed by citing a phrase from Gottfried Benn’s essay Provoziertes Leben: “God is a substance, a drug.”
This is poetic speculation, not a scientific conclusion. But it condenses the core of Hofmann’s thought: the suspicion that what we call the spirit has a chemical substrate that we neither control nor fully understand.
Critical Reading
Hofmann’s account is a personal testimony from the 1940s and 1950s, and it should be treated as such: a selective memoir written by someone with an emotional and professional bond to the molecule. The doses, environments, and medical safeguards of those early trials belong to a world that predates current safety protocols and should not be read as a model for anything. Nor does the word “psychonaut,” which Jünger coined from a romantic sensibility, equate to a recommended practice.
Beyond the anecdote, the episode is interesting because it illustrates two things that later research would confirm: that context and mental state radically condition the experience, and that psychedelic substances coexist with risks—psychological and legal—that no elegant prose can nullify. Reading Hofmann as a history of science and culture is legitimate; reading him as a guide is a mistake.
